Justin.tv Entourage Video

What do you get when you mash up the Justin.tv crew with the opening sequence of Entourage? Watch this video from NewTeeVee and find out...

Justin.TV Network Grows

Self-described "failed blogger" and vlogger Nick Douglas is the latest member of the Justin.TV family, going live on the network earlier today. His launch brings the total count of free-roaming 24/7 Justin.TV channels to nine (not counting the behind-the-scenes OfficeCam).

The Justin.TV team has launched a new channel every few days. Following Justine's launch almost three weeks ago, we've met fashion guru Parris Harris, the folks at San Francisco radio station WiLD 94.9 (KYLD), indie filmmaker Beto "Mooncricket" Lopez, Brian Solis of the Web 2.0 blog bub.blicio.us, and Hooman Khalili of San Francisco's Alice@97.3 (KLLC).

No word yet on how large the Justin.TV family will grow. With lifecasters spanning the country — and perhaps more of the globe— the Justin.TV network is increasing the chances that you'll find something interesting happening, no matter when you drop by. Gone are the days, I'd wager, of 300 some people watching Justin Kan sleep.

Meanwhile, Nick has gone out to do some grocery shopping. Less than an hour into his lifecasting debut, he Twittered his first lesson: "Warned away from showing viewers how to get to my house. Must protect secret lair!"

LIVE! From Pittsburgh, it's ijustine.tv

iJustine.tv debuts live today!
Photo credit: still of ijustine on justin.tv

Who's claiming to be Justine's #1 fan slot? The next male "J?" If Justine's SF cameo was indicative of her daily vivacious personality, you will be happily entertained. Now if only there was a TV switch button between justin and justine or side by side streaming with the ability to mute the desired screen with a simple click of the inactive screen.

The next question is who is in line to be the next lifecaster? Hollywood perhaps?

Justin.tv is hiring!

Greetings All,

We are currently looking for excited motivated people to help build the premiere live video website online. If you have extreme hacking skills (python, ruby on rails, javascript, flash action script) and you live in the San Francisco area (or are willing to relocate) please drop us a line!

Feel free to email: info@justin.tv

Peace,

Justin.tv Crew
(Justin, Emmett, Michael, Kyle, and Jacob)

PS: Look out for our new release early next week - lots of fixes, a new justin.tv channel, and more...!

New Look, Features Unveiled

Over on the newly launched "15 Minutes" blog, presumably the new official blog of Justin.TV, Michael Seibel announced their "entirely new site."

On the cosmetic side, Justin.TV got a substantial makeover, with a shinier, smoother, distinctly "Web 2.0" look. The color scheme remains dark, but now there are rounded corners, bevels, tabs, and slick AJAX tricks sprinkled throughout. The homepage was also reorganized, the infamous chat box moved up, and — perhaps most notably — elements of the updated archiver (with its user-defined "tips") put front and center.

The new design is credited to Jacob, who Michael described as an "old friend of Justin and Emmett."

In addition to the interface, though, the Justin.TV team also unveiled some new features. The archive "tips" can now be voted up and automatically submitted to Digg (and embedded in other sites, as before). The chat rooms were re-enginered to use an IRC back-end, and a moderated chat room is now set as the default. And viewers can also set up user accounts, and then earn karma points for being good fans.

Michael notes that this upgrade is just another step on the way to building out the Justin.TV network, which would be expanded to include other lifecasters. Nick Gonzales over at TechCrunch seems to have the scoop on that:

"Each Monday for the following weeks, Justin.tv will be opening their network to a new live video casters, serving as examples for the different ways fans will be able to use live video."

Ultimately, I'm certain the goal is to make their system available to everyone.

I continue to believe that Justin.TV's archive management will be its killer app. With 24-hour lifecasting, Michael told me that they're storing about 50 megabytes for every 15 minutes streamed. The "tip" system and user voting will help find the most memorable moments out of hundreds of hours of content, and the calendar navigation will make it a snap to rewind back to any point in time.

Updated Archiver Unveiled

The code monkeys at Justin.TV have been working hard behind the scenes, and this week they took the wraps off a snazzy new Justin.TV archive system.



A slick Flash application provides a calendar and clock, the option to actually download the clip, and a chance to bookmark a moment and share it as a "tip." You can jump to his gig with Alice 97.5, or revisit "Amanda.TV." Of course, I went straight back to watch Christa's arrival in San Francisco last week.

The archive doesn't go back too far, and there are chunks of time that are unavailable, but for the most part, the new archiver is a remarkable lifecasting achievement.

In fact, I'd say easy browsing and bookmarking archived video is the "killer app" in the live video space. As exciting as "live" is, the average viewer is likely to miss the majority of memorable moments in Justin's life... at least, not without sacrificing much of their own life. Being able to find highlights, both flagged by others and on-demand, will allow people who can't live on Justin's schedule to keep up, and remain fans.

UPDATE: Hmm. The bookmarked "tips" don't seem to be working at the moment. I'm sure they're on the case.

Introduction & Thanks from New Producer Amanda

Hi Justin.tv!!

Having met some of you in chat yesterday, I'm so pumped to introduce myself as the new Executive Producer for Justin.tv. My name is Amanda and as of Tuesday evening I have arrived in San Francisco for good. As I'm pretty new to both the area and the job, I would like to make my first priority turning to you, the viewers, in order to gain some insight as to what you love about Justin.tv, what you don't love (what?!?), and what you would like to see from Justin and the cast in the future.

For at least the next week, I'll be in chat twice a week from 9:30am to 10:30am and 5:00pm to 5:30pm (Pacific time). This is just to get to know you guys, as I clearly thrive on your attention... :) In terms of gaining some really focused and detailed feedback, if you're up for it, I'm interested in interviewing a few of you each week on the phone. I'm sure after chatting with you over the next few days we'll figure out the best way to do this.

Nice to meet you and thanks again for the warm welcome yesterday!!

Justin.tv at the Wild Bomb

This is a fun Justin.tv experience. Justin is currently at the WilD Bomb Concert, and I'm going back and forth between the WilD 94.9 audio-only stream and the Justin.tv video stream (currently backstage at the event). It's an interesting juxtaposition, and I can certainly see the marketability of a combination like this. The station is advertising Justin's feed on the main page web site as "Watch the Bomb Live!" with a link to an embed of the Justin.tv feed. The WilD feed would be nice to hear the music, but it's just the radio feed, meaning standard recorded music with the occasional slick pop-radio DJ commentary of the event (they're also advertising the live feed) and some artist interviews. I think it would work better if they were broadcasting the actual concert, which would be a nice complement to what Justin's broadcasting. I really prefer the less shiny but much more real feel of Justin's feed, especially for the backstage conversation, but you really can't hear the music through it. Of course, if corporations pick up live event streaming, they'll apply the corporate sheen to that, too. I hope that there's a happy medium in there somewhere.

Evicted!

The rumors are true. Justin and crew are being evicted from Crystal Towers - a.k.a. the "YSraper". Michael Seibel twittered about it earlier today with a link to a web site (digg it) making their case against the landlord (Trinity Management). The San Francisco Chronicle has more details.

More coverage:

New TeeVee

Wired Epicenter

Justin.tv + Women 2.0 = Sizzling Entrepreneurs

After all the Badtz Maru shenanigans and press from skipping a BATS Impov show, Justin has been pretty good about keeping his schedule up to date and making his appearances. As Daniel Powter would describe it: so he had a bad day, he took one down, sang a sad song just to turn it around... the camera don't lie.

Tonight at 6PM, Justin is bound to be a stud muffin at the Women 2.0 Napkin Business Challenge Pitch Night. Hopefully he won't be turning down a steady stream of intelligent and creative women entrepreneurs who are pitching their business ideas that all started with brainstorming over a piece of napkin. This should put a smile on viewers' faces who have been demanding more female action!

And, what's more innovative than Justin.tv? The Women 2.0 group was able to whittle down the numerous submissions to these curious five:

• "Laser Seal: Exploits ground-breaking interaction between light physics and cell molecular biology to reduce cost and improve quality of surgical wound closure."
• "QT Star: Video monetization and intermediary ad service company in China and the United States."
• "YouStyleMe: Online fashion community where men and women who have particular style needs can connect with other consumers who are style-savvy in a fun and engaging way."
• "Olight: Cutting-edge OLED technology to lighting designs."
• "FindYourScene: A community website where people can find “their crowd” and post, discover, and rate social events."

I encourage interested parties to attend this event in person. Otherwise watch it live tonight on Justin.tv beginning at 6:30PM PST. There's an impressive panel of judges (mostly VC's), great press outlets (the wonderful webarazzi, Natali Del Conte from TeXtra and perhaps Brian Solis and Adriana Gasciogne from bub.blicio.us), and of course, supportive hosts from Women 2.0.

If my day job permits me to leave at a reasonable hour to attend this event, then stay tune for more correspondence and my Justin.tv cameo. Dun, dun, dunnnnn...

Rebuffed BATS

Omnipresent Justin watchers Hamsterwatch and Jerry have highlighted one downside to "radical transparency": people can tell when you're blowing them off. "My dog ate my homework" doesn't work if the world can watch your dog on the Internet.

BATS Improv, which bills itself as "The Bay Area's Favorite Improv Company," was on Justin's schedule all week. He was to attend an April 20 show, a "Good vs. Evil Theatresports Tournament." BATS was looking forward to Justin's attendance, promoting Justin.TV alongside the performance and inviting fans to "Watch Tonight's Show Online" through the HatCam.

But when Friday rolled around, Justin was having a bad day. As Hamsterwatch reported, he got a call from his dad and a lecture from his teammates. When a BATS member posted about the group's Justin.TV promotional efforts, producer Lindsay called Justin on the phone to remind him about the show.

Ten minutes after the show started, Justin left a message on the BATS answering machine, claiming that an "emergency" came up.

Less than an hour later, BATS publicly scolded Justin on the Justin.TV MySpace page:

Uh...Justin...where the heck are you???? The show started 50 minutes ago!

You left a message(10 minutes after the show started) to say that an "emergency" came up. But we were watching you online when you called and you were just sitting on your couch.

We promoted your attendance at the show tonight and you should have honored your commitment.

BATS later updated its own MySpace announcement about the April 20 show:

Unfortunately, despite the fact that both Justin and his producer promised to be at the show last night, Justin decided to flake out at the last minute.

And in an extra dose of LAMENESS, we watched him online call over to the theater (10 minutes after the show started) and leave a message that he couldn't make it because of an "emergency." Then we proceeded to watch him online deal with the "emergency" of sitting on his couch.

Who hasn't bailed on a commitment at the last minute? Who hasn't told a little white lie to get out of something? We've all been there. Unfortunately for Justin, though, the camera doesn't lie. And the BATS folks are making no secret of their displeasure.

Another "Conversation" with J

Call in Hour on Justin.tv!

I gave Justin.tv a call during the call in hour to inquire about the two job opportunities that were recently posted. Since nobody really wants to watch Justin edit the code on the J.tv website (which Justin created himself,) we need a good web developer to make the website beautiful.

Anyone interested in becoming a J.tv executive producer who has experience in television or radio production is an excellent candidate. Justin said that this job “will require you to explore and invent your own space in the company and work a lot.”

Unfortunately, Justin said that people looking to fill the above positions need to live in the San Francisco area. *Poof* there go my dreams of getting closer to J.tv.... Then again, I am willing to relocate. (Are you?) If so e-mail jobs@justin.tv and let us know how passionate you are.

Get a JAY-OH-BEE at Justin dot tee vee!

Did you like how the title rhymes? Well how would you like that on your resume?

That's right! Justin.tv has two new job postings, one for Web Developer / Graphic Designer and the other for an Executive Producer.

One of the interesting responsibilities of an Executive Producer is to make the viewers happy. From what I gather in the chat rooms and blog comments, some viewers have been brushed the wrong way. Since I have personally met Justin (nope, I won't reveal my archived cameo date timestamp just yet...), he actually really loves his viewers. Although he does have an "awkward" way of expressing that thought. You really have to see him in person and not only listen to what he says but also watch his body language, which the camera completely misses unless he's asleep. Perhaps as EP, you can bring out his love-able side, in a verbal context!

Best to the job applicants!

Justin at Podcast Hotel

Today, Justin spoke on a panel at Podcast Hotel focused on the state of the vlogosphere. The discussion was moderated by Eddie Codel, and included Adriana Gascoigne (bub.blicio.us) and Schlomo Rabinowitz (Wink!).

The discussion inevitably turned toward Justin.TV and the prospect of on-camera sex, but more substantive topics were also addressed. In this clip, Justin notes that Justin.TV could have gone with a more inconspicuous camera, but that the plan was to be up front about its presence.



In this clip, Justin summarizes the general reaction he's seen to Justin.TV, weighing the many positives against the few negatives.